Marie Van Vorst

In the month of March 1901, the French painter Jean Charles Cazin died at Lavandou, a little nook in Southern France on the borders of the Mediterranean. He was in the plenitude of his talent, in the rich and mellow prime of his life. He had gone to Lavandou on one of his frequent voyages in search of change and refreshment; he died there alone.

It is an ancient prayer—“Lord, may I die in my bed,” but rather an original idea to seek to pass out of life in the very bed where one was born! This, however, was Cazin’s dream. He had carefully preserved every beloved detail in the home of his childhood and youth in Samer (Pas-de-Calais); thither he planned to return and pass his last days. He longed to inhabit again his boyhood’s room; to go forth for ever surrounded by all that had welcomed him into a world he was to leave richer for his existence. Fate disposed otherwise.

He was born in 1846, near Samer, a little town in the neighbourhood of Boulogne. His parents were well-to-do, his father a doctor of some renown. Cazin attended the college at Boulogne, and received later his baccalaureate at Lille.

In order to facilitate his artistic studies his parents sent him to Paris, where he joined the art class of the beloved Boiscaudron. This teacher’s influence on his pupils has been enormous. It must be remembered that he also instructed Rodin and Lhermitte. The tuition was free in the little class near the École de MÉdecine, and this studio made hot war against the more conservative Beaux-Arts.

Cazin never seems to have considered his student days at an end. He was perpetually learning; for ever pursuing his art as an inexhaustible classic; seeking to discover and develop new technique; to test to the uttermost his capacity. Later in life, when long past the student age, he studied in Antwerp, and his fine figure, with noble head on which the hair was already turning grey, was constantly seen in the museums, where he wandered—enjoying the masterpieces he admired and understood.

He married, early, a woman who shared his artistic

THE WINDMILL

tastes, and who herself has added to modern art. He exhibited his first pictures in the salon of ’65-66, and was also among those men who were in later years proscribed by the jury, and with his colleagues reaped the singular benefit of popularity because of adverse criticism, and became a founder of the new salon, known as the Champ de Mars. He had apparently no feverish desire to rush before the public, to present creations of his youth for criticism. Possessed of that rare patience which can wait for fame, he did not choose to force a future, and put off rather than sought a definite introduction to the world.

Meanwhile he matured his work, labouring at his canvases during that fruitful period when hope is most sanguine and talent freshest; he himself was only timidly appreciative of the work done in the interval between his appearance in the salon of 1876 and that of 1887.

In 1887, a space of more than ten years from his dÉbut, he exhibited “Le Chantier,” and from this time, with slight interruptions, down to the date of his death, his abundant work never ceased to delight the public, which accorded to Cazin the unusual mark of instantaneous favour. His work has been seen constantly in England; it is very popular in Holland, on the Continent everywhere, and he has enjoyed a marked success in America.

Later followed “La Fuite en Egypte” (1877), “Le Voyage de Tobie” (1878), “Le DÉpart” (1879), “IsmaËl” (first medal, 1880), “Tobie” (1880), “Souvenir de Fate” (1881), “Judith,” “Agar and IsmaËl” (1883).

Then followed an interval when the public looked in vain for Cazin’s name amongst exhibitors. Modern life failed to inoculate this meditative artist with the fatal haste, the febrile, nervous desire to do everything in a moment. Nothing disturbed his habits of study and the slow working out of his ideas. He retired again from public notice to mature his conceptions before showing them. Art and art alone took Cazin hither and thither on his frequent capricious voyages.

It was as though, suddenly, in a dream, some landscape beckoned him—an Italian evening or a moonlit dyke it might be summoned him; for with little warning he was in Paris to-day, in Tuscany to-morrow. Fortunately he had a family who not only understood his brusque departures, but who enjoyed the journeys

as well as did the master himself. He was in every land a student; in the Pays Bas he was an ardent painter, in Italy a constant visitor at the galleries and museums, in England a potter. The art of ceramics always strongly interested him, and he has proved himself a clever exponent of it.

For a Frenchman he travelled widely, making many trips to Holland and Flanders, Italy and England. He was keenly appreciative of the art with which these countries teemed, and studied with benefit to his own methods the Flemish and Dutch masters as seen in the Pays Bas—his imagination impressed by the sober stretches of Netherland landscapes, by the velvet seductiveness of Italian hillsides and golden towns, and the misty loveliness of English country. Of Holland he has left us numerous admirable studies, etchings, pictures—the mills and the flat meadows, melancholy dyke lines, scenes on the Zuyder Zee and in Amsterdam. All these are familiar and delightful to his admirers. Possibly he has produced no more perfect piece of work than the picture called “Moonlight on the Zuyder Zee.”

Holland, so long a school and educator and inspirer of landscape painters, has found no modern more quick to represent her country or more appreciative of its native art than Cazin. There is in his work a suggestion of the spirit of the masters of Holland and Flanders far away and removed as he is by his mysticism and the ephemeral handling of colour from the frank colourists of the Dutch School. There is the minute attention to detail, the clever value given to scheme, the massing of much in small compass, the master art of concentrating on the important point. When the painting is analysed the critic discovers that every detail is scrupulously studied.

Italy inflamed him with a love for symbolic subjects. The spirituality of the old masters was an evident inspiration to him. But, in considering Cazin, while interested to trace the different elements he found sympathetic and appealing, one fails to discover anything to detract from Cazin’s own absolute originality.

England, eminently connoisseur of landscape painting, has seen fit to approve Cazin. His exhibition in London was received with the most flattering appreciation. England knew Cazin for one of those foreigners who had adopted London as a dwelling-place, and who was in sympathetic touch with the English people.

There exists therefore for him a feeling of personal friendship.

He came with his family to England in 1871, and remained there for three years. His original project was to form a school of art of which he should be master. This plan failing, he went instead to Fulham, where he personally directed the management of a pottery, and was thus enabled to carry out his desire to experiment in this plastic art. In this he was successful. His exhibition in 1882 at the Central Union placed him amongst the first masters in modern ceramics, and after his artistic display of clays, France gave him a decoration. There is a case of Cazin’s pottery in the Luxembourg Museum.

He was received at first with a certain wonder. His drawing, intensely delicate, was forceful and striking because of its frank ingenuousness, its primitive simplicity. In his colouring harmonious and extraordinary tones ineffably soft, lights and shades indefinitely blended until at first the picture appeared through a haze, whilst under the eyes it slowly took form out of the mist; lines disengaged themselves, shapes grew distinct, and the perfect little picture fully declared itself. A good example of this is “Nuit d’EtÈ” (Seine et Marne).

It will be readily understood that this novel technique, at the time of its appearance, did not pass unchallenged. It was evidently a manner, an eccentricity—a trick of colour, a playing with the public vision! Many endeavoured to understand and reproduce the “Cazin effects.” How was it done? And it was bruited by the baffled that M. Cazin painted behind locked doors! The sorcery of the master was not to be discovered, nor was there an Élite who, behind the curtain out of gaping sight, learned the power that created “Moonlight on the Zuyder Zee.”

Will amateurs learn one day that rules of rhetoric cannot teach the scribbler how to write a lyric?—that the atelier cannot impart the sign to make brush and palette create that which is none other than the individuality of the painter? Cazin’s tender, mysterious treatment, Corot’s profound tranquillity, Turner’s golden flame, the genius of the masters, are their technique.

Cazin knew nothing of the common struggle of those artists who are obliged to ingratiate themselves into the public favour. He was accepted at once, and soon beloved—an uncommon biography. And his agreeable relations with the public, the atmosphere of

welcome and liking with which his work was met, his own family relations (of the most happy and genial kind), all is evident in his art. His pictures are full of the influence of the repose—“la douceur infinie qui rÉpand les Âmes qui sont en paix.”

Cazin possessed a strongly developed decorative sense. His contemporaries appreciated it when they gave him the supervision of the hanging of pictures at the different exhibitions and made him conservateur of the MusÉe du Luxembourg itself. This special sense is evident in his work, as, for example, the grouping in “L’Ours et l’Amateur des Jardins,” “La Parole de Socrate,” in the drawings and studies for his various pictures, designs which in many instances strongly suggest fresco and are Italian in their genre.

Until 1888 his subjects had been chiefly symbolic, chosen from Biblical scenes; figures predominated in these canvases. After this period the character of his work changed, and he devoted himself to landscape painting, and as a landscapist he will pass down to fame. For Cazin chose to surround his conception of figure-painting with the very acme of his art; with the fruit of years of patience, the mystery of labour and all that his poetic soul knew of the seasons and of changing nights and days. For even in the most important canvases, where figures fill the foreground, the value of the paintings is in their backgrounds and surroundings.

Take, for example, “Agar and IsmaËl in the Desert.” In the picture the eye leaves the group of desolate mother and child for the country’s desolation, the arid sand world, dangerous, sinister—the parching sky, the pitiful scrub growth. The thought of the narrative is lost in Cazin’s delineation of the landscape, in the atmosphere and painting of the picture, and in its subtle composition.

As a rule, for the human drama the scene is the setting, whereas with Cazin humanity illustrates the text of his creation. His landscapes, his fields, meadows, dunes, deserts, are the picture, and the figures become subordinate, suggestive, taking their character from the character of the soil and country.

The streets of the rustic villages have spoken to Cazin, and told him their secrets at evening time. His studies of the little town near his native village are especially lovely. These French parishes have whispered their mysteries, as twilight, slipping from gold to grey, steals down the twisting lanes. Cazin has caught

the sadness of the country, its monotonous desolation, as well as its repose. The pictures in themselves are almost narrative; the wide slopes of bare meadow after harvesting, the sombre note of little pine-clusters on a sandy hill, and the melancholy of the dyke lands, his own country has spoken to him as a mother to a son who understood and who will interpret her well. See the “Ruisseau en Picardie,” “Lac en Picardie,” “Route prÈs d’Equihen,” “Moonlight at Equihen.” It is into these sympathetic surroundings that he introduced the studies he cared to make of human life, Biblical subjects and a few classic themes. These are not anachronisms, strictly speaking, but show a modern spirit, which places his conception of Christ amongst men and women of to-day, as Rembrandt placed his religious pictures in the land of his birth, which makes the divine legend suddenly appear in the centre of the Norman wheat-field, or sends Mary and Joseph with the Holy Child by moonlight from a little provincial farm in Picardy. Tobias by a French riverside walks with a celestial visitor. Judith is a woman of the people, and nothing but the essence of tradition may be read in Cazin’s popularising of Bible story, in his introduction of Hebraic legend to the scenes and actors of humble, everyday peasant life. His painting of “Judith” was originally intended for the Gobelin manufactories.

Despite the fact that his mind was full of his historic and epic legend, and that dramatic subjects constantly presented themselves to his attention as schemes for pictures, his trend towards landscape was too strong, and it is extremely interesting to observe this impassioned hero-worshipper carried toward his dreamy, peaceful current which became his inevitable course. As the painter of lovely landscapes, Cazin is known chiefly as the portrayer of moon-setting and falling rain on a far, unknown country side.

Some one has said, “Turn a hundred painters loose in France before their respective bents have been decided—and ninety-nine will be landscape painters.”

So paintable is the French country, so seductive to the senses and imagination, that the land germinates and brings forth the very finest fruit of open-air painting: witness Troyon, Daubigny, Corot, Lorrain, Poussin, Puvis de Chavannes, Cazin.

Cazin had a magnificent head. His eyes were blue, his features finely chiselled and strong. His manners were most charming, and he was widely beloved.

Properly speaking, no school perishes with the death of Cazin, although, strangely enough, no master displayed greater avidity to inculcate principles of art. Despite his pedagogic passion Cazin leaves behind him no disciples who menace his fame. His art was too personal and varied to permit of a school’s foundation.

His pictures have been purchased widely on the Continent and in England and America. Time and space do not permit a catalogue of the canvases which have appeared in public and private collections. When Cazin died he was at work on two pictures destined for the State. They are symbolic subjects, and were intended for the walls of the Sorbonne. They go by the titles of “L’Ours et l’Amateur de Jardins,” and “La Maison de Socrate.”

In the Luxembourg Museum are to be seen several good examples of Cazin’s work: “Agar et IsmaËl,” “La Chambre de Gambetta,” a tragic representation of the room in which Gambetta died, two landscapes, a case of pottery, and a bust in bronze.

Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago possesses the “Judith”; “Tobie” is in the gallery at Lille; “La JournÉe Faite” in the Lyons Museum; “Souvenir de FÊte” in the Museum of the City of Paris; “Le Chantier” belongs to Monsieur May.

Alexander Harrison, the American painter, said, in speaking of Cazin: “He is a striking contrast to Courbet, for example, whose manner of painting is insistent; whereas Cazin conceals, rather than displays, his technique. His qualities are subtle and elusive. He avoids realistic brutality; his delicacy is a semi-fastidiousness in contrast to the almost fÉroce realism of Courbet, and the robust Troyon.

“His attitude towards his ideal is reserved, caressing. Suavity, a certain suggestion of concealment distinguish his work. Sometimes the unvaried tone is monotony.

“His subjects were not chosen from the great solitudes; and although figures are often absent from his canvases, the pictures always suggest the human element and are full of associations.

“His townsfolk in the Norman village where he lived seldom saw Cazin at work during daylight; but belated fishermen, returning in the small hours of late night, would find him wandering along-shore, or pondering as he paced the high sand-dunes.

“These reveries were part of Cazin’s science and art; he applied and developed the accumulated science of long study, and created the medium best fitted to express his ideas and the especial times of day he cared to paint.

“His use of a wax medium accounts for some of the quality of his work.”